MemoryManager revised

Written by MichaelMarch 15, 2010

Starting with DS version 1.1, there is now a new MemoryManager available, which was almost written from scratch. My past experience showed that the former implementation was somewhat limited, as you were forced to preallocate a fixed amount of memory prior to your application’s entry point. The new version now supports dynamic memory allocation, so memory consumption grows with application demand (you can still define an upper limit to be on the safe side). It’s now also possible to resize memory space after it has been allocated. I’ve also simplified the API and optimized the code.

Using alchemy memory in HaXe is now as simple as writing:

var integerArray = new IntMemory(x);
integerArray.free();

The first line allocates space for storing x 32-bit integers, and the second line will free up used memory once it’s no longer needed. The same also applies to BitMemory (a bit vector), ShortMemory (16-bit integers), FloatMemory (32-bit IEEE 754 single-precision floats) and DoubleMemory (64-bit IEEE 754 double-precision floats). Each implementation provides a get/set method to read/write the value from/to index i (I hope HaXe gets support for overriding [] in the future so we can omit the get()/set() methods); an offset property that stores the memory offset in bytes and a bytes property indicating the number of allocated bytes. Custom classes can be realized by inheriting from the abstract MemoryAccess class.

Frequent allocation/deallocation leads to fragmentation so the user can request defragmentation by calling MemoryManager.defrag(). In addition to the defrag() method, MemoryManager.pack() frees up unused space so it can be garbage collected. To be exact: All existing bytes are copied from the current ByteArray accessed by the alchemy memory opcodes to a smaller ByteArray, and once the reference to the former ByteArray is GC’ed the former content is deallocated (setting the .length property of the ByteArray seems to be a bit flaky and sometimes results in a runtime exception).

A quick note about MemoryManager.BLOCK_SIZE_BYTES: This value defines the growth-rate of the memory. The default is 1024 bytes (must be a power of 2). Every time the MemoryManager runs out of memory, a multiple of this block size is added. The block size affects performance and storage efficiency. As a rule of thumb the block size should match the average size of all ‘memory arrays’ used in the application. Using a tiny block size when storing 2k images is obviously a bad idea.

A major advantage of using alchemy memory is that you can use the appropriate data size that fits your needs which brings down memory usage. For example if you know in advance that your numbers are in the range 0…100 you can use bytes, or if you need floats without full 64-bit precision, you can fall back to 32-bit floats. In AS3, you are constrained to 32-bit integers or 64-bit double precision floats. Using the ByteArray is not an option because it’s too slow.

Performance

Although the preview version of FP 10.1 slowed down memory access a bit (it seems that the latest release fixes most performance issues) using those special alchemy memory opcodes is by far the best way to work with numbers. Time for some real world examples!

Example 1: JPEG encoding

After porting the JPEG encoder from the Flex framework (mx.graphics.codec) to HaXe I’ve encoded an empty 1024×786 bitmap and compared the numbers:

The HaXe version encodes the image in about 100 milliseconds, the AS3 version takes almost a second.

Example 2: Bit vectors

My next test compares an AS3 bit vector implementation from generalrelativity.org with the BitMemory from the ds package:

Example 3: FP10 drawing API

The last test draws triangles with the FP10 drawing API and measures the time needed to build a GraphicsPath object from a command and a data vector (without calling graphics.drawGraphicsData()). The HaXe version uses my VectorRenderer class which utilizes alchemy memory as a temporary buffer.

All results are based on the windows release player 10,0,42,34 and use the MemoryManager class.